No, terrorism "is the use or threat of serious violence, damage to property, or disruption of [...] systems to advance a political, religious, racial, or ideological cause, with the aim of influencing a government or international organization, or of intimidating the public."
"Whatever the government at the time doesn't like", is best described as "opposition". It's a healthy and critical component of a free and fair democracy. One that is increasingly silenced in the modern World, much to our shame when future generations judge us.
While I understand the point behind old line "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter", the key point is that both terrorism and "freedom fighting" are about resorting to the use of violence, and the democracy involved (if it was ever present), has failed when people resort to such violence.
I say this as a man who unfortunately has suffered the fear, paranoia and threat of the Provisional IRA, ISIS-attributed cells, and the hard-right provoking riots in the cities and towns I've lived in from an early age.
And that is the point of terrorism - it is meant to induce fear and paranoia and a sense of threat that makes us all want to do anything to make it go away, including surrendering our fundamental rights and rubber-stamping legislation that gives agencies the right to erase our privacy - and by extension our freedom - that raises the question of what's truly worse?
> I say this as a man who unfortunately has suffered the fear, paranoia and threat of the Provisional IRA, ISIS-attributed cells, and the hard-right provoking riots in the cities and towns I've lived in from an early age.
> that is the point of terrorism - it is meant to induce fear and paranoia and a sense of threat that makes us all want to do anything to make it go away, including surrendering our fundamental rights and rubber-stamping legislation that gives agencies the right to erase our privacy
Are you describing bomb-wearing terrorists here, or the fables of child safety that's being used by people in power to erect a surveillance state before our very eyes?
The Provisional IRA destroyed the center of my home city (Manchester) with a bomb in the back of a lorry that weighed over 1,500kgs. While growing up in the years before that attack, I was regularly evacuated from shops and other buildings in the center so that controlled detonations could take place of smaller devices.
ISIS-attributed cells conducted attacks with bombs in London and Manchester over many years, starting with the 7/7 attacks on tube lines and bus routes I happen to use sometimes.
On the 22nd March 2017, my partner crossed Westminster Bridge on her way to the theater about 30-45 minutes before an ISIS-affiliated attacker used a car to mow down pedestrians (and because she'd made it to the theater and had her phone off, I wasn't able to contact her for the first hour or so).
A month later (to the day), a suicide bomber detonated a device at a pop concert in my old home city, killing 22 people - many of them children. The bomber had made the bomb while living in an address about 40 feet from my old address when I lived in Manchester. A few weeks after that, another attack happened on London Bridge and Borough Market, on streets and in pubs where I had been socialising the week before.
I was fortunate that I, and those I care about, were not hurt or killed in these incidents. But that was fortune, not skill - a slightly delay here, or a decision to "not go this week, let's go next week", and I would have been in the middle of it all.
And these, I should point out, are not isolated incidents. The full list on Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_in... - is quite a thing. It's quite likely that most people living in a major city (or even large town), in the UK today of a similar age to myself (late 40s), will have memories of nearby terrorist attacks in their lifetimes.
Yes, there are fables of child safety at play, and since 2021 the mood has switched so perhaps there is a lesser sense of urgency, but we're now seeing the hard right starting to be responsible for more terrorist attacks and the sense of fear and paranoia is rising again.
Do I like that the price of the Manchester bombings is that the city center is now absolutely drowning in CCTV? No. Do I like that the price of the bridge attacks in London is the huge barriers to protect pedestrians on Westminster, Waterloo and London Bridges? No. Do I like that every time I go into a concert hall or sports venue, I have to have my bags checked and a metal detector is run over me? No. Do I like that there hasn't been a proper rubbish bin in a train station or bus station since the 1980s, lest it is used to place a bomb - as was a favoured technique of the IRA on many occasions? No. I hate all of it.
But would I rather all that, than have to bear the misery of more actual deaths of innocent civilians? Yes.
